NATO: Truman to Trump

What is NATO’s role in the post-Cold War era? What are the United States’ obligations vis-a-vis other NATO members? Should NATO membership continue to expand? Is NATO up to the challenges of 21st-century security?

In a lively, and at times contentious, discussion (hands hovered over civility bells!), our panelists considered whether the United States should continue to be a partner the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Watch the video and view photos below!

Panelists

Ivo H. Daalder has been president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs since July 2013. Prior to joining the Council, Daalder served as the Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for more than four years. Daalder also served on the National Security Council staff as director for European Affairs from 1995-97.

Ambassador Daalder is a widely-published author. His most recent books include In the Shadow of the Oval Office: Profiles of the National Security Advisers and the Presidents they Served—From JFK to George W. Bush (with I. M. Destler) and the award-winning America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (with James M. Lindsay). Other books include Beyond Preemption: Force and Legitimacy in a Changing World (2007); Crescent of Crisis: US-European Strategy for the Greater Middle East (2006); and Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (2000). Daalder is a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the world’s leading newspapers, and a regular commentator on international affairs on television and radio.

Before his appointment as ambassador to NATO by President Obama in 2009, Daalder was a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, specializing in American foreign policy, European security and transatlantic relations, and national security affairs. Prior to joining Brookings in 1998, he was an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and director of research at its Center for International and Security Studies.

Ambassador Daalder serves on the board of UI LABS and on the leadership board of the chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Ambassador Daalder was educated at Oxford and Georgetown Universities, and received his PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is married to Elisa D. Harris, and they have two sons.

Nina Jankowicz is a democracy, governance, and communications specialist with a focus on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Currently, she is researching a book on disinformation at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, where she is a George F. Kennan Fellow. In 2016-2017, she served as a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellow, a role in which she provided strategic communications guidance to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. Prior to her time in Ukraine, Ms. Jankowicz managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

Ms. Jankowicz received her MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where she was a Title VIII and FLAS scholarship recipient, and her BA from Bryn Mawr College, where she graduated magna cum laude. She has lived and worked in Russia, and speaks fluent Russian and proficient Polish and Ukrainian, and was named a “Rising Expert” in Eurasian affairs by the Washington, DC-based Center for Global Interests. Her commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and on CNN International’s Amanpour.

Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Security Studies Program, and serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI. His most recent book, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, was released in May 2014 (Cornell University Press 2014). He has written two earlier books, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks (Cornell University Press 1991) and The Sources of Military Doctrine (Cornell University Press 1984 ). The latter won two awards: The American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award, and Ohio State University’s Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award. He is also the author of numerous articles, including “Contain ISIS,” The Atlantic, 2015, “Pull Back: The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2013, and “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security, (Summer, 2003.) He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In 2016 he was appointed Henry A. Kissinger Chair (visiting) in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress, John W. Kluge Center.  He is the 2017 recipient of the International Security Studies Section (ISSS), International Studies Association, Distinguished Scholar Award.  He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; Guest Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, Smithsonian Institution; Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States; and a Visiting Fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center at Dartmouth College.

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he served as Academic Dean from 2002 to 2006. He previously taught at Princeton and at the University of Chicago, where he was Master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. He is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, co-chair of the editorial board of International Security, and co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs book series. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005 and received the International Studies Association’s Distinguished Senior Scholar award in 2014. His books include The Origins of Alliances, which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award, and Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy, which was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber International Affairs Book Award and the Arthur Ross Book Prize. His most recent book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (co-authored with John J. Mearsheimer) was a New York Times best-seller and has been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. He writes a weekly column at Foreign Policy.